James Lord (Mythic Giacometti), memoirist of a certain artistic set that included Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Giacometti, died recently. His fourth memoir, My Queer War (FSG), deals with his WWII army experiences, and as William Grimes quotes Lord from another time, “An autobiographer is in the business of doing for himself what he wishes not to be done to him by anyone else.”

At the age of 21, Lord enlisted in the Army soon after Pearl Harbor and, due to his command of French, he was posted to the Military Intelligence Service and served in France as a translator. This book will no doubt be tossed into the ongoing “don’t ask, don’t tell” flap, though I suppose Lord’s portrayal probably won’t help the team trying to build a case against it. Nonetheless, it does have its riveting moments and does well to suggest that the war was queer for most who served.